1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a hand-held clipper for removing entangled fibers from the surface of fabrics, and more particularly to such clipper having a semi-cylindrical shear foil and a rotary cutter rotating along the curved inner surface of the shear foil for clipping the entangled fibers entering perforation of the shear foil.
2. Description of the Prior art
There have been known hand-held clippers for removal of entangled strands of fibers or lints undesirably occurring on the surface of fabrics such as apparels and interior decorations. A prior art clipper is disclosed, for instance, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,788,769 to have a cutting head comprising a perforated circular shear foil and an inner cutter which sweeps in circumferential fashion around the inside of the shear foil. The circular cutting head with the rotary inner cutter, however, is found to be unsatisfactory since it may fail to achieve even cutting on an intended fabric surface due to an inherent difference in the rotating speed of an inner cutter blade between portions of the blade sweeping around the radially outward portion and the radially inward or center portion of the circular shear foil, and/or due to a difference in the number of perforations between the outward and inward portions of the shear foil. Further, the above cutting head is also found to be disadvantageous in that, when a greater working or cutting width is required, it has to be designed to have a correspondingly greater surface area or diameter, which makes the cutting head unduly bulky and inconvenient for handling.
One settlement for the above problems is to utilize a cutting head of reciprocating type. However, in the reciprocating type cutting head, a reciprocating inner blade is only allowed to move within a limited stroke along the inner surface of a conformably shaped shear plate, and is therefore not expected to forcibly draw in the lints through perforations of the shear plate enough to successfully shear the lints, resulting in poor cutting performance. In view of the above, it is found desirable to utilize a cutting head of a type having a semi-cylindrical shear foil and a rotary inner cutter rotating about a common longitudinal axis in sliding contact with the inside surface of the shear foil. The cutting head of this type provides a relatively wide working or cutting width without increasing overall surface area of the cutting head and enables the inner cutter to draw in the lints forcibly through perforations of the shear foil, and therefore satisfactory for clipping the lints or entangled strands of fibers from the fabric surface. Nevertheless, another problem is encountered in using the cutting head of this type. That is, when the semi-cylindrical shear foil has perforations of substantially the same sizes both in the opposed side faces thereof, the lints once entered through the perforations of one side face and clipped may be easily caused to flow to escape outwardly through the perforations in the other side face, failing to collect the clipped lints and leading to the scattering the lints over the finished fabric surface. Such undesirable scattering of the clipped lints is very likely since the clipper for the lint removing purpose is required to have the perforations which are relatively large sufficient to entrap the lints.